Monday, December 23, 2013

One
of a series exploring the current state of Open Access (OA), the Q&A
below is with Robin Osborne, Professor of
Ancient History at the University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of the British
Academy.

Earlier
this year Osborne published an essay questioning one of the basic premises of
the OA movement — that research funded by the taxpayer should be freely available
to all. To claim as much, he said, was “a gross misunderstanding” of the nature
of academic research and of scholarly publication. Yet this was the premise of
the UK government-commissioned Finch Report, this was the
conclusion of the UK government when it accepted the Finch Report’s
recommendations, and this was the assumption of Research Councils UK (RCUK) when it
subsequently introduced a new OA policy.

Robin Osborne

Osborne’s
essay met with considerable hostility from OA advocates, who complained that it
was elitist, that it was insular and
arrogant, and that it was dim-witted. Doubtless Osborne
could have been more judicious in his choice of language when challenging the
OA movement. But then so could his critics when responding to him.

Be
that as it may, in conducting the Q&A below with Osborne it seemed to me
that three key questions arise from his intervention in the OA debate. First,
of course, is whether the arguments he uses are valid. Second, we might want to
ask how representative his views are. Third, we might wonder how Humanities and
Social Science (HSS) researchers (and
their societies) should respond to the growing demands that they make their
research OA, particularly since OA policies are invariably based on the habits
and practices of scientists.

As
my thoughts on these three questions turned out to be somewhat lengthy, instead
of publishing my usual foreword to this Q&A, I have attached an afterword below
it. I do this in the expectation that some readers may only want to read the
Q&A. At the very end is a further comment from Osborne in response to the afterword.

Q&A with Robin Osborne

Q:
In an essay you wrote for
the British Academy earlier this year you argued that Open Access “makes no
sense”. You explained, “There can be no such thing as free access to academic
research. Academic research is not something to which free access is possible.
Academic research is a process — a process which universities teach (at a
fee).” I think your point was that giving someone physical access to information
is not the same thing as enabling them to make use of it (As you put it, “For
those who wish to have access, there is an admission cost: they must invest in
the education prerequisite to enable them to understand the language used.”).

OA
advocates responded by accusing you of elitism. As palaeontologist Mike Taylor
(interviewed earlier in
this series) put it on his blog,
“[I]t breaks my heart to read this fusty, elitist, reactionary piece, in which
Professor Osborne ends up arguing strongly for his own irrelevance.”

Have
I understood the point you were making about access correctly, and how would
you respond to those who say that your argument was an elitist one?

A: Yes, you have understood
correctly.

The
charge of elitism seems to me extraordinary. If we did not think that there
were some sorts of communication for which there is prerequisite training we
would not have an education system. Once one has an education system one must
treat those who have been through it differently from those who have not been
through it — otherwise one is massively wasting their time. That means writing
needs to be adapted to its readership. That way what is written is less likely
to be misunderstood and is going to be more effective at making the points that
it makes.

This
is not to argue for the irrelevance of any form of scholarship, it is very
precisely to argue the opposite — that scholarship has relevance within a
particular context (that is, after all, what relevance means).

Q:
You also argued that there is “no clear dividing line between projects funded
by research councils and an academic’s daily activities of thinking and teach.
If there are fees to teaching there should be fees for access to research.” And
you further said that attributing any particular publication to a particular
funding body “is simply impossible.”

I
think you made these points in order to rebut OA advocates’ argument that
publicly-funded research should be made freely available to the public. That of
course is only one of the arguments used by OA advocates. I am struck, for instance,
that the university that has done most to advocate for OA is a private US
university — Harvard. When I asked Harvard’s Stuart Shieber why a privately
funded university has become a leader in a movement whose main rallying cry is
“public access to taxpayer-funded research” he replied, “Harvard’s
activities toward openness are based on the mission of all universities, both
public and private, to disseminate knowledge.” Would you agree that that is the
mission of all universities? If so, should not all universities and all
scholars be advocating for OA today, now that the Internet had made it possible?

A: The issue here is not whether
scholars should make some of their work available free-of-charge to the world
at large but whether scholars should be obliged to publish all work funded in a
particular way or that is to count as research that can be graded in a REF exercise
as OA.

I
have no objection to making suitable research available to all on a suitable
website. But in fact I know that I shall have greater impact — that is, be read
by more people who are in a position to make the most of my research — if I
publish within a particular framework.

So
I am currently involved a) in making my research on Athenian democracy
available in a ‘reader’ (‘LACTOR’) that will be widely used by A-level students
in the classroom; b) in producing a magazine (‘OMNIBUS’) aimed at
sixth-form students (now in its 34th year; I’ve been involved for 27 of those
years) which commissions, edits and prints short articles in which scholars
bring the insights of their research to bear on texts and topics relevant to
Greek, Latin, Class. Civ. and Ancient History A levels.

Neither
of these publications is free but publication in either LACTOR or OMNIBUS
format will get read and studied by more people than posting on an internet
site. And certainly my publishing the more technical research from which these
publications derive would have no effect at all, since the length of exposition
required for scholarly colleagues will turn off non-scholarly readers
immediately.

So
effective dissemination and OA simply are not the same thing. I’m an advocate
of the former, which is why I oppose being forced into the latter.

Q:
In reading your BA essay I formed the impression that your main objection is to
pay-to-publish Gold OA, rather than OA per se. You may know that Harvard’s Peter Suber (interviewed earlier in
this series) recently estimated that nearly
70% of journals listed in the Directory of
Open Access Journals do not charge an article-processing charge (APC) so they are
free to publish and free to read.

And
of course there is also Green OA, where authors continue to publish in
subscription journals, but then make their papers freely available by self-archiving
them in their institutional repositories. In their submission to the
Business, Innovation and Skills Select Committee inquiry into Open Access earlier
this year The Classical
Association (of which you are a former President) and The Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies (of which I
think you are also a former President) said that they supported the principle
of Open Access to research, but argued that this can be achieved most
effectively by Green OA, so long as an embargo period of 36 months is applied. They
added that they do not feel that the subscription model for learned societies
is “in itself flawed or unsatisfactory”.

Do
the views of these organisations accord with yours? If not, in what ways do
your views differ?

A: You are right that my BA
article aimed primarily at Gold OA — partly because it was first written more
than 6 months before it appeared, when I was trying to get the BA to take OA
seriously, and at that point Gold OA was the chief game in town.

I’m
more cautious about Green OA than the CA/SPHS etc. have been, partly because
dispositionally I regard the approach that says ‘yes, but’ as politically
problematic when there are points of principle that need making, and partly
because there simply isn’t the experimental data to allow a judgement to be
passed as to whether with scholarly journals in the humanities 36 months is too
short or unnecessarily long. (The figure of 70% of journals listed in the
Directory of OA journals does not move me since in the humanities journals
serve niche markets, and so what matters is the practice of the journals
serving your niche.)

The
issue under debate is not whether a scholar should be allowed to make their
work available OA — if it were I would be fighting for that possibility. The
issue is whether scholars are going to be compelled to make their work
available OA however unsatisfactory the OA options are for them.

If
journals were being compelled towards a Green OA policy by market pressure,
that would seem to me fair enough. But instead the pressure is being applied by
research councils and by government when there is clear evidence that neither
research councils nor government have seriously thought about the consequences
or have any notion of the different publishing patterns in different subjects
and disciplines.

Q:
You prefaced your BA article by saying that the claims you were making about OA
were limited to research in the Humanities. You added, however, that “very
similar arguments apply to research in the sciences also”.

In
the recent Guardian live chat on OA that
you took part in I formed the impression that you found yourself talking at
cross purposes with those with a focus on the sciences. Do you continue to think
that similar arguments to those you used in your article also apply to the
sciences, or might it be that the situation is actually rather different for
the sciences (not least, perhaps, because there is much more funding available
for the sciences)?

A: I’ve become convinced that
there are some pretty fundamental differences between what publication means in
the sciences and what it means in the arts.

I
suspect that one sort of scientific publication is dominating the science
debate, and that there are other sorts of scientific publication that are much
closer to arts publications, but I do acknowledge that there is a big
difference between arts and STEM (though I’m not so sure about Mathematics…).

Q:
Another distinction we should perhaps make is that between journals produced by
commercial publishers and those produced by learned societies. I suspect your
focus is more on the latter (I think you are on the editorial boards of several
learned society journals for instance). The Classical Association and The
Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies certainly drew the distinction when
making their submission to the BIS Committee. And they pointed out, for
instance, that excess revenue earned from their publications helps support the
Institute of Classical Studies and their other activities (conferences,
lectures, and seminars etc.).

Learned
societies often make this argument. Critics respond by suggesting that such a
strategy is back to front. If there is a shortfall in society funds, they
argue, it is more appropriate to increase membership dues than to tax readers.

Others
argue that scholarly publishing is currently inefficient and that OA offers the
best long-term route to improving the efficiency of learned society publishing
— see this Harvard
blog post, for instance, which argues that society
publishers would be under less threat from commercial publishers if they adopted
Gold OA, since shifting from the reader-pays to the author-pays model would
make the scholarly publishing market more efficient, and so help society
publishers, many of who are currently threatened by the “big deals” offered by
large commercial publishers. Do those who make these arguments have a point, or
is their argument erroneous?

A: In many learned societies the journal comes
free with membership, so it is not a matter of increasing membership fees
rather than charging for the journal. The journal is the major ‘good’ that the
society produces.

The
problem with the Harvard blog argument — that learned society journals would be
better off under a Gold OA policy — is that it ignores the desire of such
journals to be homes to contributions from independent scholars, retired
scholars, and young scholars who are unlikely to have access to appropriate
APCs. The more care a journal takes over its submissions the better they are
for such scholars, who often have much less chance of quality feedback from
other sources before submitting their papers, but by the same token that high
quality of care means that the realistic APCs need to be very high.

Spreading
what is now paid for by 1,000 subscribers across 10 or 12 contributors has
obvious consequences for the relation of APCs to journal subscriptions:
essentially scholars would be paying up to 3 life-times of journal
subscriptions for a single contribution…

There
clearly are some small scholarly fields where readership levels are small and
the particular readership so expert that it does not need much in the way of
refereeing or copy-editing. But in fields with a significant readership in
numbers and range (e.g. classics journals being read by school teachers and by
students) high-quality refereeing, which not only sorts out the good from the
bad but much improves the good, both refereeing and copy-editing are essential.
Refereeing is done free of charge because it is in the interests of the journal
and of the learned society that runs it.

But
when a commercial publisher asks for referees’ reports it pays for them. If an
author is paying for my refereeing services I am likely to think myself
entitled to some of what he pays. If a reader is paying for the product, then I
am proud to have had a part improving the product that the learned society
produces.

Q:
How would you characterise the current state of OA, both in the UK and
internationally?

A: Lots of resignation here, and
because Green is so much less horrific than Gold people have rallied behind it,
forgetting the completely objectionable compulsion that is being applied. I’ve
less sense of the position abroad, which seems to me to be much more varied, partly
because there are many parts of the world (e.g. USA) where the scope for
compulsion is much less.

A: Green is going to be prime in
the humanities; gold may be bigger in sciences. But primarily I expect
confusion as to what counts as Green, and a lot of multiple publication of
essentially the same article, partly in OA form, partly in non-OA form.

People
who want to be read in the humanities will stick with non-OA forms for some
time to come, except when compelled to do otherwise.

Q:
If you do support the general principle of OA, what do you think still needs to
be done to achieve it, and by whom? If you do not support OA, what do you think
should be done to resist it, and who should do that?

A: I think compulsion is to be
resisted by everyone in all circumstances. I find the attempt to pretend that
there is a moral issue here itself morally repulsive.

Q:
OA advocates argue that the greatest beneficiaries of OA will be those in the developing
world, where many universities can generally afford no more than a handful of
journal subscriptions. Would you agree that the developing world faces a
serious accessibility problem, and do you think that OA can solve that problem?

A: There is no doubt about the
access problems, and many journals have distributed copies free or at much
reduced prices in certain parts of the world for a long time. But without an
appropriate educational base most scholarly literature will remain ‘Greek’.

Q:
The seeds of the OA movement (certainly for librarians) lie in the so-called “serials crisis”, which is an
affordability problem. It was this affordability problem that created the
accessibility problem that OA was intended to solve. Publishers argue that OA
will be no less expensive. OA advocates, by contrast, argue that it will be
less expensive than subscription publishing. What are your views on the
question of costs? Does cost really matter anyway?

A: Yes costs matter. But high
journal costs were a product of scholars needing a proxy for quality. Learned
society publications provided that in small fields, but the problem in science
was very different. OA has done nothing to help that problem. The problem of
having a way in each field of sorting out the important research from the
merely interesting (or indeed the mistaken) is one that remains to be sorted,
OA or not OA.

~~

Robin Osborne FBAis Professor of Ancient History in the
University of Cambridge, Fellow and Senior Tutor of King’s College Cambridge
and a Fellow of the British Academy. He was Chairman of the Council of
University Classical Departments 2006–2012, and President of the Classical
Association in 2012–13. He is the Chairman of Sub-Panel 31 in the upcoming REF
2014. His work ranges over the fields of ancient Greek History, archaeology and
Art History. His recent books include the second edition of his Greece
in the Making, 1200–479 B.C.
(London: Routledge, 2009); Athens and Athenian Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2010) and The History Written on the Classical Greek Body (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2011).

His list of publications is freely
available here, but you have to pay for his books.

~~

Afterword: Background and futures

When
commenting on Open Access, observers often (and rightly) point out that the OA
movement has been driven primarily by scientists. One consequence of this, they
add, is that when governments and research funders introduce OA policies they
tend to build them around the research practices of the STEM disciplines, and then take a one-size-fits-all
approach, regardless of any differences between the disciplines.

Critics argue that this is
problematic, not least because it fails to recognise that the culture and practices
of scholars working in, say, the humanities and social sciences (HSS) are very different
to those of scientists. HSS scholars tend to use different research methods,
and they generally communicate their scholarship differently. (Academics in the
humanities, for instance, are more inclined to publish monographs than submit
papers to journals — thus, in the UK’s 2008 Research
Assessment Exercise,
only 36% of the history
submissions
were of journal articles, the remainder being monographs or volumes of essays).

More
importantly, critics add, HSS scholars do not have access to the same levels of
funding as those working in the STEM disciplines. Consequently, they say, any
model requiring that researchers pay to publish is impracticable for HSS
scholars.

Nowhere
have the potential problems of adopting a one-size-fits-all approach been more
evident than in the UK, where earlier this year RCUK introduced a new OA policy
(which was first announced in July 2012).

Tuesday, November 19, 2013

One of a series exploring the current state of Open
Access (OA), the Q&A below is
with Ann Okerson, Senior Advisor
on Electronic Strategies for the Center for Research Libraries (CRL), and a former Associate University Librarian at Yale University.
Okerson also serves as a consultant on library projects.

Ann Okerson

Prior to joining Yale, Okerson worked as founding
senior program officer for scholarly communications at the Association of
Research Libraries (ARL) in
Washington, DC, after having written the consultant report Of Making Many Books There is No End: Report on Serial
Prices. Published in 1989, this was one of the early
rallying cries to libraries and academia about the spiralling costs of
scientific journals.

After arriving at Yale, in 1996, Okerson organised the
Northeast Research Libraries Consortium (NERL), a group of 28 large research libraries (and over 80 smaller affiliates)
that negotiates licences for electronic information (i.e. “big deals”) and
engages in other forms of cooperative activity.

In 1997, with funding from the Council on Library and
Information Resources (CLIR), Okerson and
colleagues at Yale library mounted an online educational resource covering the
topic of library licensing of electronic content, in a project called LIBLICENSE. In
addition to web resources and tools, this includes the influential mailing list
liblicense-l, which
today has over 4,200 subscribers, including librarians, publishers and
attorneys.

Describing her current job at CRL in a recent Wiley Exchanges interview,
Okerson said, “I’m engaged with Bernie Reilly (CRL’s dedicated,
creative president) and his senior staff to identify openings and opportunities
for CRL electronic engagement:for
example, playing a supporting role in some digital activities (such as
supporting work for newspaper digitization projects) and a lead role in others
(such as cross-consortial negotiations for significant archival and current
e-resources).”

At CRL Okerson is leading a community working group
tasked with rewriting the “Model Contract” originally pioneered at
LIBLICENSE in the late 1990s. She has also just completed a two-year term as
Chair of the Professional Committee of the International Federation of Library
Associations (IFLA) as well as
four years on its Governing Board.

Harnad’s
message is now viewed as one of the seminal texts of the OA movement, although it
(and the book it led to) was published before the various strands of the
movement had coalesced into a single effort (and adopted the name “open access”)
— which happened in 2001 at the Budapest
Open Access Initiative (BOAI).

Today Okerson is a member of the international
steering committee for SCOAP3, a project designed to transition the principle scientific journals in
the field of high energy physics to an OA business model. SCOAP3 is set
to go live in January 2014.

Given her background, Okerson is well placed to give
an informed view on the current state of Open Access. Inevitably, she views
matters through the eyes of a librarian.

What is striking to me, however, is that — at a time
when many librarians have come to view publishers as the enemy — Okerson
appears surprisingly balanced and objective in her views.

It is no surprise, then, that she views herself as
belonging to the “pragmatic wing” of the OA movement. “I’m always thrilled with
‘better,’ but I also like ‘now’”, she says.

For that reason, she adds, her biggest disappointment is
“the way that the desire for the best can get in the way of the really pretty
darned good. The dialogue that we need to have among academics, librarians,
publishers, and policymakers breaks down when it becomes ideological, and real
opportunities can be missed.”

What in Okerson’s view is the current state of Open
Access? “I remember getting my head around the concept of the asymptote back in
Algebra II, that ideal line the curve is trending towards, closer and closer
without ever absolutely reaching,” she says. “That’s my mental model for how we
are progressing with open access. We’ll likely never get 100% there, but the trend and progress are
real. If we were all a little less ideological, a little more pragmatic, there
would be a variety of things we could be doing now that would advance our
objectives and push the curve closer to the ideal line.”

Wednesday, October 30, 2013

One
of a series exploring the current state of Open Access (OA), the Q&A
below is with Michelle
Willmers, Project Manager of the OpenUCT Initiative at the
University of Cape Town (UCT) in
South Africa.

Michelle Willmers

A former journal
publishing manager, Michelle Willmers was drawn to the Open Access movement after
witnessing international publishers sweep into South Africa and acquire local
journals. They then locked these journals behind paywalls and sought to sell
them to local academic institutions at prices most simply could not afford.

For the South
African academic community this was a case of bad to worse: Historically South
African research has not been published over much in international journals. As
such, it has tended to be invisible to the global research community. Now it
was in danger of becoming invisible to local researchers as well.

Explaining her
journey to OA Willmers says, “It was perhaps less of a case of becoming an OA
advocate than having a deep realisation that the local scholarly communication
paradigm was broken. The conversation around how to first acknowledge and then
address this led in the open access direction.”

It was this same broken
local context that led to the creation (in 1997) of the South Africa-based
service African Journals Online (AJOL) — which Dominique Babini referred to in an earlier Q&A in this series. A local web portal that
enables African journals to make their content available online (and so visible
on a global basis without the need to cede ownership to international
publishers), AJOL currently hosts content from 462 African journals, 150 of which
are OA.

And it is this local
context that saw the recent launch of SciELO-SA, a South African version of SciELO (Scientific Electronic Library Online), the online open-access publishing
platform pioneered in Brazil. SciELO-SA was launched with the
content of 26 “free to access and free to publish” South African journals, and
it is expected that the service will eventually include around 180 of the
country’s 300 journals.

Monday, October 21, 2013

To what extent should we expect
publishers who profess a commitment to Open Access (OA) to be open in other ways too? This is a question
often raised in discussions about OA. Some, for instance, argue (e.g. here
and here)
that OA ought to go hand-in-hand with open peer review (particularly in light
of the recent “sting” of OA journals by Science). Others have argued
that OA publishers have a duty to be more open in the management of their
business. And it has been suggested that OA publishers should be more transparent about their finances. But what about when publishers make use of
social media like blogs? How transparent should they be about who is behind the
site, and what their objective is? This thought occurred to me recently when I
was trying to find out who runs the Open Science blog.

Like
companies everywhere, scholarly publishers have in recent years taken an
increasing interest in the social web. Most, if not all, now have their own
Twitter accounts, some have Google+ accounts, and most now run their own blogs
(see for instance those run by PLOS, BioMed Central, Wiley and Elsevier).

In
doing so, they invariably view the new platforms as useful new marketing tools
for promoting their products and services — or in some cases as a space where
their authors can promote their own books or journals (see, for instance, the
blog run by Springer). Given these
objectives, it is apparent to anyone reading or subscribing to these blogs
exactly who runs them, what their purpose is, and the nature of the
relationship they are asking readers to enter into with the site. If nothing
else, the URL will invariably flag ownership.

But
what if a publisher were to run a blog without indicating that it owned and/or
controlled it? Suppose, for instance, that the intention was simply to provide
a platform for discussing and reporting on a particular topic (e.g. Open
Access). In such circumstances, could anonymity (or at least some degree of
non-transparency) engender more productive discussions? In other words, might
it be possible to provide a more effective communication platform if ownership of
the site was cloaked in some way? Or would the interests of the site owner make
it impossible to provide an independent platform?

Wednesday, October 16, 2013

One
of a series exploring the current state of Open Access (OA),
the Q&A below is with Philippe
Terheggen, Managing Director, STM Journals. Terheggen, who is responsible for all 2,500 of Elsevier’s journals, is
the second representative of a traditional commercial publisher to take part in
this series.

Philippe Terheggen

As
the largest legacy journal publisher, Elsevier tends to attract more criticism from
the OA movement than other publishers. One could argue, however, that it has conspired
in this by doing more than other publishers to try to derail OA — not least by aggressively
supporting the infamous Research Works Act (RWA) in 2011.

Today,
however, Elsevier accepts that OA has become mainstream, that it needs to
embrace it, and that it may not turn out to be the monster that the publisher assumed it to
be. As Philippe Terheggen says below, “In
my opinion, we’re past the notion of OA as a threat to publishers as there are many
examples of OA publishers who run a perfectly healthy business.”

Please
scroll through if you wish to go direct to the Q&A

At the end
of the Q&A is a timeline

But
where is Elsevier with OA right now? Currently, it publishes some 2,500 journals,
all of which are available on its electronic platform ScienceDirect, which now hosts nearly
12 million articles. The vast majority of these journals, however, are still
subscription-based, and Elsevier currently publishes just 56 pure Gold OA journals. It
does however offer a Hybrid OA
option for 1,600 of its subscription journals.

How
quickly is Elsevier moving to embrace OA? At the beginning of 2013 the
publisher had 31 OA titles. This year 25 new ones will be added, and the
expectation is that a further 25 OA journals will be launched in 2014.

Sunday, October 06, 2013

Sami Kassab is an Executive Director at the
investment company Exane BNP Paribas, where he runs
the Media Research team covering professional publishing. Amongst the companies Kassab
monitors are Reed Elsevier, Thomson Reuters, Informa, John Wiley, Wolters Kluwer, and Pearson. Currently, Kassab is positive about
the sector, arguing that scientific publishing offers “best in class defensive
growth in a very resilient industry”. Kassab believes that Open Access (OA) is still a marginal activity and in any case poses neither
a short-term nor a long-term threat to large scholarly publishers. In fact, he
says, it will enable them to monetise more articles than they have been able to monetise historically.

Kassab’s views
will undoubtedly challenge OA advocates, who have long maintained that Open Access
will mean that publishers will play a much smaller role in disseminating research in
the future. This, they add, will force them to downsize, and so reduce the financial burden on the research community. Indeed, it was in the
expectation that OA will lower the costs of scholarly communication that many
people joined the OA movement in the first place — especially librarians, who
have long sought relief from the so-called serials
crisis (Whereby the
cost of serials has consistently outstripped libraries’ ability to pay for all
the journals they need).

Concomitantly,
OA advocates argued that Open Access will inevitably reduce the profits of
scholarly publishers, a belief that gained credence from the way in which publishers have persistently lobbied against OA over the past decade or so.

Until a few
years ago Sami Kassab and his colleagues at BNP Paribas viewed OA as a
threat to publishers too. In 2003, for instance, the website newratings.comreported
that BNP Paribas had downgraded Reed Elsevier to “underperform” — on the
grounds that the investment firm had concerns “regarding the company's current
subscription based access, as compared to the newer and more successful
article-fee based open access system.”

But this is no
longer the view of Exane BNP Paribas, or of Kassab. Today the investment company is upbeat
about the future of large scholarly publishers like Elsevier.

Sunday, September 29, 2013

One
of a series exploring the current state of Open Access (OA),
the Q&A below is with Björn
Brembs, Professor of Neurogenetics at
the University
of Regensburg in Germany. Brembs, who self-characterises
himself as a “disgruntled user of a dysfunctional scholarly communication
system”, believes it is time for the research community to take ownership of the
scholarly communication system back from publishers, and build a “modern
scholarly infrastructure”.

And two years earlier, in 2002, a group of like-minded people had
gathered in Hungary to launch the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI). Although the
notion of making papers freely available had been around for a decade or more,
it was in Budapest that the term “Open Access” was finally adopted.

We
could also note that 2004 was the year that Springer launched
Open Choice, pioneering the controversial form of OA known as Hybrid OA.
The same year the UK House of Commons Science & Technology Select Committee
published an
influential report recommending that all UK researchers be mandated to deposit
copies of their articles in their institutional repository so that their
research could be “read, free of charge, online.”